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Digital Disruptors

Erik Kruse and his Networked Society team at Ericsson have been publishing a number of reports, under the common theme of “Industries In Transformation”, about how the hyper-connectivity brought by the internet is changing the business landscape. These reports are of very high-quality, well researched and documented and an easy read – the home page for the initiative is here.

The latest report in the series is titled “Digital Disruptors – Models Of Digital Operations” and focuses on how companies should organise themselves to operate in a digital environment, serving hyper-connected consumers and customers. I love this subject and have talked and written about it in my previous Innotribe work and my current job at the Gates Foundation. Erik Kruse and Jan Unkuri, the editor of this report, have been kind enough to reach out to me and incorporate some of my themes in the report.

I’m honoured to be featured among many other people with a very wide range of expertise and industries. I’m also excited to see how some deep themes resonate across this last report but also the entire series –

– open innovation and the change to internal culture it brings, the subject of my book

– user centrism, and specifically the notion that consumers are more and more in control of how services are provided to them, rather than being forcefully managed by providers. This is the Vendor Relationship Management idea promoted by Doc Searls. The idea comes from a book Doc co-authored back in 1999 with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. The book is called “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and I recommend it – it is still very fresh today!

– reducing friction. “Every single step that you put between the customer and the actual function is friction”. Yes- every superfluous click will drive customers away. This means that companies will have to “cut” their services in pieces that can be combined by consumer according to their needs – this includes combining business “pieces” from several different companies. The technology enabling this is called the API (application programming interface) and I have written about it previously.

Enjoy reading and let me know your thoughts.

PS: another fresh thing about the report is it doesn’t mention Bitcoin. Rare enough to be underlined these days 😉